Other Paper
A causal analysis of human mobility on colonization of disease-carrying tiger mosquitoes in Spain
Kotov, E., Pardo-Araujo, M., Eritja, R., Bartumeus, F.
29th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science
3 pages.
Tartu, Estonia, Zenodo
published: 14 May 2026 (version v1) / 29th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science - Poster Track, Tartu, Estonia (2026)
Abstract
The rapid expansion of the tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus in Spain poses an increasing public health risk for arbovirus outbreaks. This study uses the COVID-19 lockdown as a natural experiment to quantify the causal role of human mobility in mosquito colonization. To disentangle the effect of human travel from the confounding influences of physical proximity and climatic suitability, we apply double machine learning (DML). By partialling out these spatial and environmental factors, we found that when existing, stable human mobility flows transform into active risk corridors (because the origin municipality becomes invaded), the destination's baseline monthly risk of a first-time mosquito detection is multiplied by a factor of five. This constitutes a substantial surge in invasion hazard. These results provide the first empirical macro-level evidence of a causal link between human mobility and mosquito colonization.
Keywords: Spain, diseases, ecology, human geography